Recycling
by yasuhei
Summary: [Oneshot] The world moved on while Sasuke slept.


_"Those who don't follow orders are trash..."_

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** Recycling,**  
A oneshot Naruto fanfiction  
by yasuhei  
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Before anything else, there was sound. A buzzing and burbling noise that oh so slowly separated itself out and became distinct sounds. There were voices amongst them, sounding a little panicked and worried.

"...waking up. It's still hours ahead of schedule."

"Forget the schedule for now. How are the growth patterns? Have they reached final staging yet?"

"I think... Yes. Yes, the indicators are all good, just not matching with the projected time frame."

"Then everything is fine, and there's nothing to worry about. Himiko, get a message sent to the Hokage now. He's going to want to know about this. Everyone else, how's the clean up going? Is everything prepared and ready?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Then everyone out. He'll want some privacy when he arrives."

There were no more voices after that, just the sound of a door, and the quiet clicking of feet.

Sasuke was glad that they were gone. He hated the idea of unseen people watching him. It had been like that while he had been with the village of sound, someone watching him from the shadows every minute of every day. Being unwatched was far better, though after a time he did find the relative silence a little boring.

He couldn't move his body. At first this was because it just wouldn't respond to him at all. It didn't feel like it was his at all really. Instead it felt as if it were a statue cast from lead into which his brain had been set. Trying to make it move was like trying to pull the moon to the earth by force of will alone. Finally, he made his fingers twitch, and then his toes. Further progress seemed inevitable, but was delayed when he found that an outside force was also hampering the movement of legs and arms.

He was shackled, it seemed.

His eyelids were even less responsive to his will than his arms and legs had been. It was another age until he forced them open, and when he did he could not at first focus properly upon the ceiling above him.

Frustration and rage flashed through him as he lay there as good as fucking blind. He was impotent and powerless. What difference did being able to see really make. Lying trapped here he was as helpless as a newborn child.

The rage passed with time too, and he found that he could move his head, could look around the room and take in the sights now.

Stark white walls surrounded him, matching the uninspiring ceiling. There was a definite hospital like feel to the place, but that look was overshadowed by arrays of complex devices and instrumentation that stood against every wall of the room. Fluids of various colours stood in large glass cylinders and bubbled faintly. There were wires passing through some of them, he realised, and tubes too. They attached to various bits of machinery, or screens that scrolled out information he didn't understand. Lifting his head from where it lay he could look down the length of his body and see that yes, the tubes and wires attached to him to him.

The scene briefly put him in mind of some of Orochimaru's experimental subjects that he had seen while in the village of sound. For a moment he imagined that he could have somehow fallen back into the clutches of the old snake. He did after all have no recollection of how he got here. But that was impossible, because after all he had killed Orochimaru once he had learnt what he needed and the opportunity had presented itself.

Even forgetting that fact, there was no way that this set up could belong to that man. The devices were hardly putting Sasuke at ease, but they lacked something that would have marked them as Orochimaru's. They did not drip with enough sinister intent to mark them as his.

Besides, the people from earlier had mentioned the Hokage. That meant that he was with the leaf. He supposed that it remained to be seen whether that was a good or bad thing.

There was a knocking on the door, and Sasuke turned his head in time to see the door swing open, and a blonde-haired older man step through.

Hokage indeed. Perhaps Sasuke was dreaming, for it seemed like the Yondaime Hokage had stepped right out of the Hokage monument and into his hospital room. It was made all the more unreal by the pair of red Sharingan eyes that inhabited his eye sockets. That just didn't make sense. The Yondaime had not been an Uchiha, not as far as Sasuke knew anyway.

The eyes were enough of a distraction that it took a moment before he noticed the other major discrepancy to the features of the man. Set deeply into the flesh of his cheeks, six 'whisker' marks. There was only one person he had known who had had marks like that.

"Naruto?" his voice came out rough, but tremulous nonetheless.

Naruto nodded. He smiled too, though there was a glimpse of sadness in the smile, poorly hidden at the edges of his eyes.

"That's right, Sasuke."

He was so old. So very, very old. In his mid thirties at least, possibly even his forties. The last time Sasuke had seen him they had both been sixteen. What had happened that so much time could have passed? How long had he been sleeping if Naruto had aged this far, or could it be something else? Some disaster or jutsu that had aged him prematurely? It seemed impossible, and he wasn't sure he wanted acknowledgement of its truth. Would it maybe be better to imagine it was nothing more than a dream?

"Are you..." Sasuke drifted off, not sure exactly what it was that he wanted to ask this older Naruto. What could he ask that would make things be _alright_?

"Am I the Hokage now?" Naruto suggested for him, "Yes I am. I had to struggle hard to get this position, and now that I have it I sometimes find myself regretting that I ever bothered trying. Still I wouldn't wish it upon anyone else either, and there aren't many others who I would trust to make the decisions."

"You regret it?" The words leapt from him before he realised it. The thought of Naruto regretting such a thing seemed so ridiculous. Dreamlike. Everything happening was so very dreamlike.

"Some days," Naruto nodded to him, "Some days I regret it a great deal. I am acknowledged, as was my childhood desire, and more importantly I have the ability to protect everybody. Protecting everyone is not as simple as I thought it would be, however. To succeed I have to do some terrible things, and no matter what I achieve in this life I will never stop regretting them.

"The things I do make me a monster Sasuke, and the things I must order others to do make them monsters too, but I have little choice in the matter. If I don't then the people under my command will die, and the people who I am sworn to protect will reap the consequences. It is the people of Konoha and of the rest of the land of fire who would suffer for our unwillingness to make sacrifices."

"It's not a good world out there, Sasuke, not at the moment. I think maybe you would have dealt with it better than I do, but I'm glad you haven't had to. I'm glad I never had to order you to do these things."

It was too much to deal with really, and suddenly Sasuke desperately wanted the old Naruto back. The one who he had once known so well, who had been loud, brash and idiotic, but kind and well meaning too. This Naruto seemed kind too, but so very worn down by the world, and it sounded like he would do things that the Naruto Sasuke had once known would never have done.

The Naruto he had known hadn't had Sharingan eyes either.

"Your eyes..." he rasped out, cursing himself for his inability to speak clearly.

"The Sharingan?" Naruto asked, "Yes, well... That's a complex thing really. You caught up with Itachi eventually, but you mustn't have been as ready as you thought, or perhaps he was just more powerful than any of us really expected. He defeated you. I caught up to the both of you not long afterwards. I'm sorry, but I was the one who was finally able to defeat him."

That was such a ridiculous idea, the thought of the dobe being the one to defeat Itachi alone was enough to almost make him laugh aloud. Then again, Naruto no longer seemed to the enthusiastic idiot that Sasuke remembered, and _something_ had to explain the Sharingan eyes he now had.

"Is_that_ why you have the eyes?" he wondered aloud, "Is that who you got them from? Itachi?"

"Not exactly," Naruto squared his shoulders, and flashed his sad little half-smile at Sasuke again, "When Sasuke lost to Itachi, he died. We found the body afterwards. There wasn't all that much left really, but there was enough. Both genetically and spiritually, enough lingered with the body that we could work towards making ourselves copies. I always knew that Sasuke was too stubborn to ever completely let go of this life, and I was right. He's still here with us, just enough of him that we can create clones like you. We can grow you up from strands of protein and streams of Chakra. Build ourselves something that's not quite Sasuke, but very much like him."

It was nonsense, fiction, impossible. Sasuke's chest was tensing, drawing inwards to press at his lungs even as his breathing sped up. The things he was saying were lunacy. Nothing more than a plot from a science fiction novel, no more real than carriages than moved without horses, or trips to the moon. It could not be.

"I'm sorry Sasuke," Naruto was still saying, "But it's not your life that you are remembering, not really anyway. The memories are residual things, borrowed from the original. It's cruel to give them to you when they aren't really yours. I've known what it is like to have someone else's experiences bouncing around inside your head. It's not a pleasant thing, or at least I didn't find it to be. I would have spared you it if I could, but it was important to us that you develop your Sharingan before you awoke."

If not for the restraints around him he would have taken a swing at Naruto. No matter how much more powerful than him the older man might be he would have made a good attempt to physically force him to retract his words. As it was he had to settle for snarling.

"You're lying! It's not possible! I'm Sasuke! Me! Do you fucking hear me?"

Naruto just shook his head sadly. That sadness was the scariest thing of all that had happened. Naruto had never looked sad like that. He'd never had to regret the way he had behaved in that sort of way.

"I want you to understand something for me Sasuke. You betrayed our village and you betrayed me, and you aren't even the first you, but that doesn't matter to me. I still love you. You are like a brother to me, and I need you to know that, okay Sasuke? I care for you deeply, and I wish to the gods that I didn't have to do this to you."

"What..." Sasuke started to ask, alarmed by the sound of that, but he was distracted by the sound of the door opening again.

The pink hair of the woman who entered was all the clues that Sasuke needed to recognise her. Sakura had changed every bit as much as the blonde had. She looked perhaps slightly younger than he did, but that didn't make her look less changed. Perhaps it even made it worse. While there was now sadness to Naruto's eyes, there was instead coldness to Sakura's. To one of them at least. The other was hidden by her forehead protector, which she had pulled down in the same way that Kakashi had used to.

She ignored his presence, instead walked over to a small steel trolley on which surgical implements seemed to be arrayed.

"Sakura..." Sasuke started to say, but he was silenced when Naruto firmly placed one hand over his mouth.

"You can't talk to her now Sasuke. It only ever makes this harder for her, and it's difficult enough for her as it is."

As he spoke Naruto had wrapped his other arm around Sasuke's head, firmly holding it in place and forcing him to stare up at the ceiling again. He heard the tapping of Sakura's feet as she walked towards him, saw her again as she stepped close, and bent slightly over him. She'd moved the forehead protector up away from her other eye now, revealing that like Naruto's two orbs, it was sharingan. Redder than blood, tomoe spinning lazily.

How was it that so many people could have Sharingan eyes? Apart from Itachi he had been the only other Uchiha left alive hadn't he?

"I'm sorry Sasuke," Naruto said, and the sorrow was readily apparent in his tone, "We don't want to do this, but it's a time of war and we can't afford to give up any resource that we have access to. We have too many enemies these days, and we only just manage to maintain the superiority of the leaf. We can't afford to throw away any possible advantage."

There was a curved blade in Sakura's hand, Sasuke noted as she lifted it into his field of vision.

"I'm so sorry Sasuke, my brother. Please forgive us."

And the blade descended towards his eye.

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The end.  
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End file.
